2016 The Year Of GNU/Linux On Many Desktops

See Top 7 Desktop OSs from 4 Jan 2016 to 3 Jan 2017It’s not as spectacular as I would like but GNU/Linux has been growing steadily and particularly on weekends at home, I presume, all over 2016. Chrome OS GNU/Linux has really taken share globally. Yes, those are global numbers to the right. If you look at just USA, Chrome has reached 4% on a good weekday. In Uruguay, GNU/Linux reached 15% on a weekend. So, the students there are also taking it home … Then there’s the mysterious, “Unknown”. I’d bet it’s a */Linux OS… It’s all good.

About Robert Pogson

I am a retired teacher in Canada. I taught in the subject areas where I have worked for almost forty years: maths, physics, chemistry and computers. I love hunting, fishing, picking berries and mushrooms, too.

6 Responses to 2016 The Year Of GNU/Linux On Many Desktops

DrLoser wrote, “A ChromeBook costs you (or your educational establishment) something like $200 for a very serviceable Web Browser with a tiny amount of other functionality built in. (But not for FLOSS free — see if you can find a way to download and install Google’s stuff.)”

Hmmm… The Odroid-C2, fully-equipped costs about $100 delivered and will drive an existing TV, with a real keyboard and mouse to boot. I think that’s very competitive technology especially combined with Debian GNU/Linux. Know anyone with a TV and some USB-gadgets hanging around?

A ChromeBook is just fine for browsing the web but it’s cumbersome for folks with an IT-estate at home or in the office. If you need a local server to access stuff from a ChromeBook, why not just have a regular thick/thin client and carry on? You can still browse the web and use Google’s stuff if you want. Really, TLW has a multifunction printer which scans to her local FTP server. What’s it going to do with a ChromeBook? Then again she has a gazillion images and a bunch of videos of family etc. It’s just a waste of bandwidth to keep sending them back and forth to Google. She and I have better uses for bandwidth like loading web-pages. With our local server, we can run databases, build kernels, search, edit stuff while also browsing the web. Why let Google get in the way of that? Also, we can do more for less our way. At the moment, she’s eating dinner, while watching CNN and I’m building a custom kernel for her new machine and writing this comment. I just don’t see how a ChromeBook would work for us as well. We’d constantly be working around it.

Remind me again of those posts, not so very long ago, wherein you decried “Web Page Statistics” as meaningless, Robert.
Or, alternatively, go boil a frog.
Now, Dougie is quite right. As is DeafSpy. And, indeed, Kurks. (It might only take five spurious links from Fifi to convince you that you are on your own on this one.)
The Market is speaking, here. A ChromeBook costs you (or your educational establishment) something like $200 for a very serviceable Web Browser with a tiny amount of other functionality built in. (But not for FLOSS free — see if you can find a way to download and install Google’s stuff.)
This is all well and good. It’s how The Market works. But it doesn’t bespeak any sort of advantage in terms of “modular software” or “the four freedoms.”
It’s a niche market, and as Dougie points out, a very sensible one to buy into as a consumer. Which leaves me wondering why you, as a total cheapskate, would see any sort of cost/benefit whatsoever with a domestic computing environment consisting of:
* A useless Cello server, as yet not delivered, and
* An eight-core Intel machine that your far better half uses to conduct her business.
I’m sure you have an explanation for all this. I’m not so sure that it will withstand the withering scorn that Dougie will, justifiably, heap upon it.

“Chrome OS GNU/Linux”
Wow! I am inclined to think that you’re the only being in the Universe to say that.

Anyway, I got thrilled with the news of TLW using an Intel, 8-core laptop. Now, now, Robert, what about your crusade to remove all Intel, because the world didn’t need idling CPUs? Now, TLW will have at least 7 cores idling most of the time and wasting precious energy. Then, the best days of the unfortunate Odroid C2 are over. The poor thing will be your toy and an incidental music / video player for TLW. Just watch how she’ll do all her work on the 8-idling cores, and ignore the so good C2.

Ts, ts, ts, Robert, you should be ashamed. Not only you are a hypocrite. If you fail to make your point at home, how can you expect anyone else would even listen to you?

She’s a professional and a grandmother. Some features of ChromeBooks are great for her. Others are not. She has tons of local data accumulated over decades. She’s not about to spread it all over the web when she has her own server on the LAN. We happen not to like Chrome browser either for its tendency to spy. Google mines a lot of data from our e-mail at the moment. There’s no reason to give them more than that. Indeed, we probably should set up our own e-mail server but for now we have not decided that. In the world of Trump I’d like to move all my stuff out of USA. It’s just an unstable and untrustworthy regime.

Who could ever tell that what was needed for Desktop Linux to finally break the 1-2% barrier was some big company dropping a serious amount of dollars into it and having lots of paid devs working on it full-time. I mean, who could have ever thought that…

We Windows guys have been telling you all along: Red Hat quiting the effort to make money from Desktop Linux back then was a major loss for Desktop Linux and any attempts to spin it as a win of the communitah was just that: a spin. It took two decades and an entirely different business model to put serious R&D bucks behind Desktop Linux.

Of course, that new business model includes the practice of data mining user habits to sell to sleazy advertisers, but to be honest, Microsoft has the exact same business model circa-Windows 10, with the difference they charge you for the OS (for devices with no screens or screens bigger than 9 inches). So, I am with you at this Pog. Let the Google-controlled Desktop Linux flourish. Let’s also hope that when this happens, enough romantics will stay behind on distros like Debian to keep the lights on like they did for Maemo… err… never mind…

My Mission

My observations and opinions about IT are based on 40 years of use in science and technology and lately, in education. I like IT that is fast, cost-effective and reliable. I do not care whether my solution is the same as yours. I like to think for myself.

My first use of GNU/Linux in 2001 was so remarkably better than what I had been using, I feel it is important work to share GNU/Linux with the world. I have been blessed by working in schools where students and school systems have benefited by good, modular software easily installed in most systems.

I have shown GNU/Linux to thousands of students and hundreds of teachers over the years and will continue in some way doing that until I die in spite of the opposition.